Dear Dirty America

I touched at least one ‘nerve’ with my article If only you knew how dangerous the children are in Gaza. So, from the Dear Dirty America Mailroom, I thought I’d share this comment:

you are literally the most disgusting individual. I am an american who has been to palestine on several occasions and your statements are disgustingly immoral and uneducated. You are calling all the children basically insects and deserve to die. You are a sick human being and obviously very ignorant if you are saying that every child is raised to be terrorists? tell me adam, how many times have you been to palestine? None of these children are raised as terrorists, and NO CHILD deserves to die at the hands of these filthy israelis. Worse than the holocaust, and they are turn around to do the same thing to others. You need help for even posting this and you are beyond scum. Embarrassed to even consider you a human being. Obviously you were raised to be a heartless, ignorant despicable human being. but we will leave it up to god to deal with you -American 4th grade teacher

I like the comment left above. It’s anonymously brave and enormous in its integrity. Maybe 4th grade teachers aren’t supposed to visit Dear Dirty America. Perhaps such websites are off limits. Another thing clearly not allowed in the 4th grade is satire. Because if 4th grade classrooms taught satire, this teacher could have easily recognized and destroyed my naive and simplistic article. It’s not great satire. It’s heavy-handed. It’s over-the-top. If anything, it’s too obvious.

She might have brought my article into her classroom and read it aloud to her students. “I want to read to you all a very despicable, disgusting, degenerate article that is so pro-Israel it’ll make your heads shrink,” she would have said.

After reading the article, one small student seated nearly in the back would raise his little hand. “Miss T—, isn’t that story supposed to be a joke?”

“Oh, it’s a joke all right, especially whoever lets this dangerous piece of human scum write this garbage. That’s the joke, Billy.”

“But Miss T—,” a girl in a pink dress might have said, “I think Billy means whoever wrote the article did it just for fun. But to get a point across.”

“That children are insects and dogs?” the teacher asked loudly. “Do you kids feel like insects and dogs?” She shook her head miserably. “He got the point across. I got it. And it’s despicable.”

A plump child sitting in the middle of the class raised his fat arm and said, “I think Billy and Sarah mean that the article is using exaggeration and some irony to expose how stupid and awful some people are. In this case, the Israeli government, and that man they call Net-and-yahoo.”

The well-fed child’s father would have been a professor, in order to have engendered such a bright and scholarly young son. The plump kid and his family were also featured in an article called Fat family says it will struggle this Thanksgiving to eat even more than usual.

“Isn’t,” the child continued, “the writer, possibly, as saddened and disgusted about the killing of those children in Gaza as you are? Isn’t that his point?”

“You’re all just children!” the teacher would shout. “What do you know?” The kids would immediately sit straight in their chairs. “And no matter, I left that filthy writer a real humdinger of a comment that should knock his ego into next week!”

The moral of this story: Who is educating our teachers? Do we want to know?

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